For Director Mike Leigh, Life’s Not Always Sweet : Movies: The British director’s bleak ‘Naked’ would seem to be worlds away from his more optimistic efforts--but it just has a different agenda, he says.

Mike Leigh handed over maybe 25 pages of paper, bound together. “Here we are,” he said. “Here’s ‘Naked.’ This is what we worked from when shooting started.”

I’d asked to see a script of “Naked,” the film that won Leigh the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival this year; its leading man David Thewlis was named best actor (Thewlis was also named best actor last week by the New York Film Critics Circle).

What Leigh produced was not recognizable as a script at all, but simply a scene-by-scene skeleton of the film’s structure without dialogue. It read: “Scene 1. Manchester. Johnny and woman. Scene 2. Johnny steals car.” And further along: “Scene 25. Office Block. Johnny meets Brian.”

Leigh smiled, a trifle impishly: “That’s why I don’t get approached by Hollywood. To be honest,” and he gestured at the 25 pages of paper, “they couldn’t handle that.”

He has a point. Leigh is now among Europe’s leading directors and has been directing films in Britain for 22 years. But after his well-received feature debut, “Bleak Moments,” he worked mainly in television for the BBC and made a dozen or so TV films, many of which dealt with social issues and their impact on the blue-collar characters Leigh tends to highlight. He returned to features in 1988 with “High Hopes” and followed it in 1990 with “Life Is Sweet”--two movies that earned Leigh ecstatic reviews from critics in the United States and Europe. But over the years, Leigh has developed an idiosyncratic way of making films, as far from the Hollywood model as can be imagined.

Before shooting starts he, his actors and crew assemble for a long preparatory period. (In the case of “Naked,” it was 11 weeks.) With prompting from Leigh and from improvisation sessions with each other, actors are encouraged to develop their roles; they do “research,” often by going out and interacting in the real world, in character. When shooting starts, scenes are written from improvisation until absolutely precise, then they are rehearsed while shooting waits. This makes for a long shoot--”Naked” took 12 1/2 weeks.

“What I put in that structure,” Leigh said, pointing again at the “Naked” outline, “can change. Things get swapped around. So the process of shooting is actually an investigation, a discovery of what the film is.”

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This is not a mode of working to make potential investors in Leigh’s films feel relaxed. “Of course not,” he agreed. “But I can’t get into a situation where I don’t enjoy the carte blanche I’m used to. . . . I’ve met Hollywood people who say, well, things are different now. But I don’t believe it. I don’t think they’re geared up for it.

“Of course,” and here he permitted himself a sly, sideways grin, “if anyone in Hollywood wants to hand over (money) for a film to be made here without any interference on their part, fine.” He’s not holding his breath, which is understandable--the very nature of Leigh’s films springs from their being made within a strictly independent context.

“Naked” is a case in point. It is a bleak, dark and sometimes violent account of one man’s odyssey among London’s underclass. Johnny (Thewlis) is a young unemployed man with a quick wit, given to brilliant, pun-drenched monologues that illuminate his disdain for the world. He steals a car in Manchester and drives to London, where his ex-girlfriend Louise lives. He has violent sex with her flatmate, Sophie, encounters a combative young homeless couple from Scotland, discusses the imminence of the apocalypse with a philosophical security guard and sexually abuses a woman he sees dancing drunkenly in the window of her flat.

A character called Jeremy (Greg Cruttwell) is an upwardly mobile version of Johnny--bright, scornful and filled with disgust for himself and others. He rapes Sophie in one scene and is sexually abusive to all the women he meets.

“Naked” is markedly different in tone from “High Hopes” and “Life Is Sweet,” both ultimately optimistic essays asserting that caring families can sustain individuals through the harshest adversities. While “Naked” has won praise through Europe, British critics reprimanded Leigh for the film’s portrayal of misogyny. According to a report in the Independent, women have walked out of “Naked” shouting: “Five pounds (the price of admission), five rapes!”

Leigh does not attempt to hide his exasperation at those who assume that he endorses misogyny.

“People here who criticize Johnny for being just aggressive or just misogynistic miss the greater complexity,” he sighed. “While not wishing to exonerate Johnny’s negative aspects, the point is that he’s a deeply frustrated case of a lack of self-fulfillment and wasted potential. He was one of those guys who must have been seen at school as a troublemaker rather than someone to encourage and help.

“It’s no coincidence that my last two films, ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Life Is Sweet,’ had strong, positive women at their emotional center. You have to see ‘Naked’ as coming from the same place, but it’s a different film with a different agenda.”

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Leigh is 50, with the mournful eyes of a bloodhound. His voice retains strong traces of his native Manchester, and he speaks in long sentences with a mildly lecturing tone. His penchant for drab, shapeless, woolly clothes is a kind of personal trademark. His body language is intriguing; for this interview, he contorted his body sideways, wrapping one foot around the other leg uncomfortably--a classic posture of defense.

Yet for all his critics, Leigh has a firm following in Britain. Many movie fans regard him as the country’s most original filmmaker. This adulation is shared by the actors who work with him--including Tim Roth, Stephen Rea, Gary Oldman and Jane Horrocks. Thewlis has said that he never expects another acting experience to equal “Naked,” in which he is in almost every scene.

Alison Steadman, Leigh’s wife of 20 years, regularly appears in his films; arguably her most notable performance was as Wendy, the chirpy, garrulous but nurturing mother in “Life Is Sweet.”

Steadman says, “They broke the mold when they made Mike Leigh. He says what he thinks, and he doesn’t suffer fools. He’s been quite poor most of his life. He could have directed other things, but he’s stuck to what he believes in.” Yet she admits he can sometimes be hard to live with: “But I think people who are creative are often volatile, up and down, never ordinary or run of the mill.”

Despite his international reputation, Leigh still finds it a struggle to raise money for his films, low-budget though they are. “Naked,” which cost $2.4 million, was financed by British Screen (a private company supported by government grant) and Channel 4 television. “My films make their money back,” Leigh said, “but they don’t make their money back three times over, which is what you need to be taken seriously.”

But what if a magic wand were waved, and Mr. Not-Ready-for-Hollywood suddenly had bigger budgets at his disposal? “I’d like to deal with subjects on a broader canvas,” he admitted. “The money would go on more locations, better production design. And I could have more characters in my movies and more time to work with them. Even so,” and he gives a sharp glance, “I don’t think the way I work would change. Not at all.”